Amid all the celebration over America’s plunging gas prices — down some 40 percent since June – it’s easy to forget a very basic fact: In a global sense, U.S. fuel has been cheap for years. In late 2012, for instance, the United States ranked toward the bottom of a world list of gas prices, wedged between the likes of Tunisia and Chad on one side and Russia and Kazakhstan on the other. Most first-world countries paid at least double what America did then, just as they do today.

The situation is hardly a happy coincidence for U.S. motorists. On the contrary, American fuel prices are kept down artificially by low gas taxes that fail to address the true social cost of driving. An international comparison of gas taxes shows the United States in back of the pack by a wide margin:

This national refusal to increase gas taxes — which have gone unchanged at the federal level since 1993 — has two enormous impacts on everyday life. The first is that drivers no longer cover the cost of road and bridge maintenance, as the gas tax originally intended. UC Davis scholar Mark Delucchi recently estimated that drivers fall short in this respect by 20 to 70 cents per gallon. General taxpayers have made up the resulting budget gap in recent years, whether they drive or not.

That’s not a horrible injustice, since most Americans still travel by car. The far bigger problem is that America’s gas taxes are too low to offset what economists call the “externalities” of driving. Don’t let the word spook you; all it means is that driving creates all sorts of negative social impacts that aren’t being compensated for: personal time and work productivity lost to traffic congestion, lives lost to car crashes, and health risks created by air pollution, to name just a few.

When Delucchi tallied up these costs, at least as they existed for 1991 driving patterns, he estimated them at upwards of $3.3 trillion a year (below, our highlight). As he told me recently by email, discussing the use of that figure in an infographic for The Atlantic, “clearly driving is way underpriced.”

Delucchi, Environmentally Conscious Transportation (2008)

So what would gas taxes look like if they reflected the true social cost of driving? It’s no easy question to answer, but for some sense of one we turn to economist Stefan Tscharaktschiew of the Dresden University of Technology, who recently tried to calculate the “optimal” fuel tax for Germany. His goal was to find a number that not only reflected all the social impacts of driving, but also one that accounted for changes in behavior that would result from more expensive gasoline.

After crunching the numbers, Tscharaktschiew reached an optimal gas tax of .96 euros per liter — a figure that amounts to more than $4.36 a gallon in American money. Mind you, that doesn’t include the actual market cost of gasoline. In other words, the optimal German gas tax, by itself, roughly doubles what average Americans are right now paying total at the pump.

Tscharaktschiew explains to CityLab that most of this optimal figure (.85 euros) reflected externalities like congestion (.4 euros), safety (.2 euros), climate change (.1 euros), and pollution (.09). He actually lowered the tax a bit (about .2 euros) to discourage some drivers from switching to more harmful diesel cars. But he raised it another .3 euros so it could replace other taxes, such as the labor tax, considered more harmful to the German economy. Hence, .96 euros a liter.

And Tscharaktschiew only expects the number to climb over time. More fuel-efficient cars will make it cheaper to drive longer distances, which in turn will create the potential for more social costs of driving, which in turn calls for a higher gas tax to offset these impacts. Eventually he estimates the figure could climb as high as 1.69 euros a liter, or more than $7.62 a gallon.

Simply put, the gas tax in Germany is not only not too high, but “it is very likely to be even too low,” Tscharaktschiew concludes in a recent issue of Economics of Transportation. And that’s for a country that pays significantly higher gas taxes than the United States does. Though the calculations would need to be altered considerably for the U.S. context, the work strongly suggests that any gas tax that fully corrected for the social costs of car reliance would upend life as Americans know it.

Needless to say, a proposal to raise the gas tax this high would be laughed out of the room (at best). The short-term pain would be on the order of a housing collapse or a zombie invasion. Michael Specter of the New Yorker may have put it best when he likened cheap gas to “an industrial form of crack”: impossible to quit, no matter the damage it causes.

But in the long-run Americans would see some very real benefits from a price of gas that most closely reflected the true cost of driving. Fewer loved ones killed in car crashes. Healthier pregnancies and babies. More time spent with family and friends. Better access to jobs, and perhaps as productivity increased, higher wages. More livable developments and, with them, slimmer waistlines. Cleaner and quieter air. The sorts of things we can’t fit in our purses or wallets, but which cost us dearly just the same.

The ever-thought-provoking David Levinson posed a question at his Transportationist blog that’s worth a longer look: Are you more likely to die from being in a car crash or from breathing in car emissions? If your gut reaction is like mine, then you’ve already answered in favor of crashes. But when you really crunch the numbers, the question not only becomes tougher to answer, it raises important new questions of its own.

First, let’s look at U.S. traffic fatalities at the national level. For consistency with the pollution statistics (more on that in a moment), we’ll focus on 2005. That year, there were 43,510 traffic crash fatalities in the United States, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That’s a fatality rate of roughly 14.7 per 100,000 Americans.

Now we turn to deaths attributable to air pollution — more specifically, to particulate matter produced by cars. A research team led by Fabio Caiazzo of MIT, who appears from his university profile to be an actual rocket scientist, recently quantified the impact of air pollution and premature death in the United States for the year 2005. They reported that about 52,800 deaths were attributable to particulate matter from road transportation alone. (Road pollution had the largest share of any individual pollution sector, at around a quarter of all emissions-related deaths.) That’s a mortality rate of roughly 17.9 per 100,000 Americans.

By that estimate, road-related particulate matter was responsible for about 19 percent more deaths, nationwide, than car crashes were in 2005. And keep in mind that particulate matter isn’t the only air pollutant produced by cars (though it is the most significant type). Caiazzo and company attribute another 5,250 annual deaths to road-related ozone concentrations, for instance. In other words, the true health impact of auto emissions may be much greater.

At the city level, this broad conclusion remains the same. Here are the mortality totals and rates attributable to road-related particulate matter in five major metro areas tracked by Caiazzo and colleagues: New York (3,615 / 28.5), Los Angeles (2,092 / 23.3), Chicago (1,379 / 28.4), Dallas (374 / 23.2), Washington, D.C. (533 / 28.6). The rates are well over 20 per 100,000 people in all five places.

CityLab

Now here are the fatality totals and rates from car crashes in the same five metros, via the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Granted, these figures are from 2009 instead of 2005, but even taking that inconsistency into account, the difference is striking: New York (986 / 5.1), Los Angeles (848 / 6.6), Chicago (565 / 5.9), Dallas (611 / 9.8), Washington, D.C. (408 / 7.5). In no case does the fatality rate even reach double digits.

These straight fatality figures make a strong case that car emissions are deadlier than car crashes at both the national and major metro levels. But death is only one measure of these health impacts. Age of death matters, too, especially since younger people tend to be involved in fatal car crashes. In 2012, for instance, about 55 percent of the people who suffered motor fatalities were under age 45. Caiazzo et al. report that emissions tend to cut lives short about 12 years, whereas crashes cut them short about 35 years.

Levinson tries to adjust for age through the Global Burden of Disease database, which includes a measure called Years of Life Lost. In 2010, there were 1,641,050 years of life lost attributable to particulate matter, against 1,873,160 years of life lost to road injuries.

That might seem like a near wash, but in fact the gap is much wider, because the these data reflect all air pollution, not just road-related air pollution. If we figure (based on Caiazzo*) that 25 percent of all deaths attributable to air pollution come via car emissions, then road injuries account for more than four times as many years of life lost as particulate matter from cars — 1,873,160 to 410,288.

Circling back to the original question, whether car crashes or auto emissions is deadlier, we find any answer requires additional parameters. Strictly speaking, Americans appear more likely to die from auto emissions. In terms of wasted life potential, crashes seem the bigger danger. If anything, the absence of a clear single answer is a revelation in itself, suggesting that the problems are more on par than we typically treat them.

So why don’t elected leaders pay as much attention to emissions-attributable deaths as they do to car fatalities? The answer no doubt has a lot to do with something Levinson’s University of Minnesota colleague, Julian Marshall, said during their discussion of the topic: “no death certificate says ‘air pollution’ as cause of death.” Rather, emissions are yet another risk factor and invisible killer in a world full of risk factors and invisible killers. As such they’re convenient (and perhaps even comforting) to ignore. A road death, meanwhile, is stark and tragic and undeniable — in political terms, a much stronger platform.

But what should cities do about it? Well, they can start by drawing more attention to the problem. A true Vision Zero campaign, for instance, would acknowledge that even a New York without road fatalities wouldn’t be a New York without car-related deaths and illnesses. (That’s not to criticize this initiative; just to make a point.) As a stronger step, cities can follow the likes of London, which recently announced an additional tax on emissions-heavy cars, and start charging these drivers the true cost of their social impact (or something closer to it). A few drivers can pay now, or general public health can pay later, but everyone pays eventually.

* It’s worth pointing out that the Caiazzo study and the GBD reach vastly different conclusions about how deaths are attributable to total emissions in a given year: roughly 200,000 for the former to roughly 103,000 to the latter.

A big reason for opposition to bike lanes is that, according to the rules of traffic engineering, they lead to car congestion. The metric determining this outcome (known as “level of service”) is quite complicated, but its underlying logic is simple: less road space for automobiles means more delay at intersections. Progressive cities have pushed back against this conventional belief — California, in particular, has led the chargeagainst level of service — but it remains an obstacle to bike lanes (and multi-modal streets more broadly) across the country.

But the general wisdom doesn’t tell the whole story here. On the contrary, smart street design can eliminate many of the traffic problems anticipated by alternative mode elements like bike lanes. A new report on protected bike lanes released by the New York City Department of Transportation offers a great example of how rider safety can be increased even while car speed is maintained.

To see what we mean, let’s take a look at the bike lanes installed on Columbus Avenue from 96th to 77th streets in 2010-2011. As the diagram below shows, the avenue originally had five lanes — three for traffic, one for parking, and one parking-morning rush hybrid. By narrowing the lane widths, the city was able to maintain all five lanes while still squeezing in a protected bike lane and a buffer area.

NYC DOT

Rather than increase delay for cars, the protected bike lanes on Columbus actually improved travel times in the corridor. According to city figures, the average car took about four-and-a-half minutes to go from 96th to 77th before the bike lanes were installed, and three minutes afterward — a 35 percent decrease in travel time. This was true even as total vehicle volume on the road remained pretty consistent. In simpler terms, everybody wins.

Over on Eighth Avenue, where bike lanes were installed in 2008 and 2009, the street configuration was slightly different but the traffic outcome was the same. Originally, the avenue carried four travel lanes, one parking lane, one parking-rush hybrid, and an unprotected bike lane. Again, by narrowing the lanes, all five were preserved (though the hybrid became a parking lane) even as riders gained additional protection.

NYC DOT

After the changes, traffic continued to flow. DOT figures show a 14 percent overall decline in daytime travel times in the corridor from 23rd to 34th streets once the protected bike lanes were installed. That quicker ride was consistent throughout the day: Travel time decreased during morning peak (13 percent), midday (21 percent), and evening peak (13 percent) alike. To repeat: A street that became safer for bikes remained just as swift for cars.

So what happened here to overcome the traditional idea that bike lanes lead to car delay? No doubt many factors were involved, but a DOT spokesperson tells CityLab that the steady traffic flow was largely the result of adding left-turn pockets. In the old street configurations, cars turned left from a general traffic lane; in the new one, they merged into a left-turn slot beside the protected bike lane (below, an example from 8th and 23rd). This design has two key advantages: First, traffic doesn’t have to slow down until the left turn is complete, and second, drivers have an easier time seeing bike riders coming up beside them.

For good measure, let’s also look at mobility on First Avenue, where protected bike lanes were added up to 34th Street in 2010. The design of First Avenue was dramatically altered. What was previously five travel lanes and two parking lanes for cars became three travel lanes, two parking lanes, a bus lane, and a protected bike lane — a significantly more balanced travel network.

NYC DOT

Despite all the changes, travel speeds remained just about the same as they had been before. Average daytime taxi speeds dropped maybe one mile per hour after the reconfiguration, according to DOT figures. But that minuscule delay was likely countered by an overall rise in mobility: Bicycle volume increased 160 percent, for instance, in addition to whatever transit gains the bus enhancement provided.

So we see an example, in the busiest city in America, of smart street design improving travel for everyone. That’s not to suggest you can jam unlimited new modes onto a given street and still have everything move well. But it does show that just because a city values travel alternatives over car-centric engineering doesn’t mean that city’s traffic has to come to a halt.

City retailers tend to overestimate the importance of parking to their business. They fail to see the many downsides of free parking (congestion and low shopper turnover, among them). They believe more people arrive at the store by car than actually do. They may not even realize that while driving customers spend more per visit, non-drivers spend as much or more in the long term.

And yet whenever a city considers installing a bike lane, rest assured some retailers will protest the perceived loss of automobile access. Take the bike lane that stole a dozen parking spaces from 65th Street in Seattle a couple years back (for reasons that will seem far less arbitrary in a moment). The typical comment from a bike lane opponent to the city’s department of transportation went something like this:

Please do not take away the 65th St. traffic lanes for bicycle lanes. Traffic is congested already and eliminating street parking for cars will [be] detrimental for all small businesses located on 65th.

If you find such claims strong on emotion and light on empiricism, you’re not alone. Kyle Rowe, who’s studying the built environment at the University of Washington, decided to put that standard retail response to the test. He put together a case study to see whether businesses really had a beef with bike lanes, or were making a fuss about nothing [PDF; via Transportation Issues Daily].

Rowe collected city data on taxable retail sales in the corridor before and after the bike lane on 65th Street went into place. He compared the 65th Street sales figures to those generated by a similar retail corridor where no changes had been made to the street, and also to the sales made by retailers in the entire neighborhood. What he found isn’t exactly subtle (the green bar is when the lane was installed):

So that happened. After the city removed 65th Street’s 12 parking spots and striped a bike lane there instead, the sales index in the corridor exploded 400 percent. Now keep in mind that Rowe didn’t have the experimental controls to say that the bike lane caused the increase — some other factor may have played a greater or contributing role — but it’s quite safe to say business didn’t suffer from it.

To make sure 65th Street wasn’t a fluke, Rowe also looked at a lane installed in the Greenwood district. There the city removed an entire lane of traffic as well as a few parking spots to accommodate the bike lanes. Once again Rowe compared taxable sales in the corridor to a similar strip and the neighborhood at large. Here’s what he found:

Those results don’t look too special — especially after the 65th Street chart — but that’s kind of the point. Business didn’t spike in the Greenwood district once bike lanes were added, but it didn’t plummet, either. It did about as good as everywhere else in the area. Writing at the Seattle Transit Blog last month, Rowe says the unequivocal takeaway is that bike lanes have no “negative impact” on retailers:

Looking at the data, one conclusion can clearly be made, these bicycle projects did not have a negative impact on the business districts in both case studies. This conclusion can be made because in both case studies the business district at the project site performed similarly or better than the controls.

Rowe’s isn’t the only recent study of its kind. A very fresh analysis of how bike lanes (and pedestrian improvements) impact retailers in New York reached similar conclusions. At best, retailers in a corridor seem to benefit from the change. At worst, they can still count on business as usual.

Climate change is at least a distant fifth in line for attention from the federal government, behind sequestration, debt ceiling, gun control, and immigration. Couple that position with the fact that many congressional lawmakers don’t even think warming exists, and the United States isn’t likely to take meaningful climate action anytime soon. That means it’s up to localities to take the lead — states in a general sense, but really cities themselves when it comes to the details.

To better understand the motivation for local action, UCLA urban planner Rui Wang has been studying how cities go about taking action on climate change. Wang recently reviewed California planning surveys to determine climate actions taken in 2008 and 2009 by the state’s 480 cities. In an upcoming issue of Urban Affairs Review, Wang reports that cities tend to adopt climate change policies in increments — pushing simple policies first, then in some cases working toward more challenging ones.

In other words, writes Wang, cities pick for the “lower-hanging fruits.” (Even in California, with state environmental laws like SB 375 and CEQA in place, cities must implement the policies.)

Take the adoption of local actions to mitigate harmful emissions. For 2008 and 2009, Wang found that the most widely adopted policy climate actions were at the individual project level, such as mitigating greenhouse gas emissions in a major public project (71 percent). Efforts to tackle the problem at a systemic level were far less common. Only 15 percent of cities calculated their community baseline emissions, and only 9 percent set formal emission reduction targets.

A similar pattern emerged with regard to particular projects in 2008. Cities more commonly adopted project measures that improved energy efficiency in buildings or reduced car travel (48 and 44 percent, respectively). When it came to sequestration measures, such as planting trees to trap carbon, that rate fell to 23 percent. Only 2 percent of cities went so far as to purchase carbon offsets.

These findings show us two things about city climate actions, according to Wang. The first is that local climate actions in California occur incrementally — not haphazardly. Cities willing to adopt tougher systemic actions (like baseline targets) or project measures were very likely to have already adopted the easier policies that most cities chose.

Of course the second thing we see with the results is that most cities stop at the easier policies. The easier individual mitigation strategies can be “win-win”: reducing building energy, for instance, not only helps the environment but saves money. The tougher ones, like purchasing offsets, require direct costs and have fewer tangible benefits for developers.

So the goods news is that, at least in California, localities are working up toward strong policy in an incremental fashion — not tossing darts and seeing what they hit. The less good news (it’s certainly not “bad,” per se) is that many cities are stopping at what Wang calls the “easier” actions:

The above observations indicate that some actions were adopted first and more frequently, whereas other actions, probably because of their higher costs or institutional barriers, were mainly adopted by a subgroup of those who adopted the “easier” actions. This incremental pattern of adoption sup¬ports the existing literature’s finding that cities tend to focus on win-win measures but fail to adopt a systematic and structured strategy to tackle climate change.

This analysis must be kept in broader perspective, especially compared to federal inaction. Yes, some cities may be picking what Wang calls the “lower-hanging fruits” when it comes to climate change policies. At the same time, climate action remains a very new part of the policy world, and in some cases the easiest policy may also be a good fit. What climate actions cities are picking is important to know — but that they’re picking deserves recognition as well.

From a behavioral perspective, the hardest thing about adapting to the slow process of climate change is creating a sense of urgency. After a close call with Hurricane Irene a couple years back, and a horrible clash with Hurricane Sandy this past fall, New York is beginning to accept the fact that when it comes to weather patterns along its coasts, there’s a terrifying new normal.

Late last week, just two months after Sandy, a state commission released a massive, 200-plus page blueprint on ways to develop resilience in the face of tomorrow’s environment [PDF]. The NYS 2100 Commission — one of several formed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo following Sandy — evaluated the state’s critical infrastructure systems and recommended a gradient of goals, from broad to specific, to reduce their vulnerability.

“There is no doubt that building resilience will require investment, but it will also reduce the economic damage and costs of responding to future storms and events, while improving the everyday operations of our critical systems,” write commission co-chairs Judith Rodin of the Rockefeller Foundation and Felix Rohatyn of Lazard in a foreword.

While the commission offered statewide suggestions, its emphasis fell naturally on the New York City metro area — especially coastal parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Long Island — where Sandy hit hardest.

The report’s recommendations were based on five characteristics of resiliency: spare capacity (e.g. establishing backup systems, such as alternative transportation routes), flexibility (favoring “soft” solutions that can be modified over time, like improved hazard maps and evacuation plans), limited failure (designing infrastructure networks, especially power grids, to shut down in pieces instead of wholes), rapid rebounds (initiating preemptive response strategies, like creating fleets of portable generators), and constantly learning.

Ideas produced by this model of resiliency cross a number of infrastructure sectors. Some of the broadest ones touch on the insurance and financial sides of resilience. The commission recommends considering ways to pre-fund disaster recovery, for instance, and also the establishment of an infrastructure bank to coordinate and maximize the investments bound to occur in coming years. A general strengthening of the energy grid, especially securing critical systems, is also suggested.

Many of the recommendations specific to New York City fall in the category of land use. The former includes a host of “green infrastructure” initiatives. These take the form of restoring wetlands and oyster reefs in New York Harbor to break up storm surges, or building an archipelago of small islands in front of the harbor, or dumping old subway cars into the sea to form barrier reefs. (As Sarah Goodyear recently pointed out, even green infrastructure is subject to destruction during major storms.) The commission also suggests a comprehensive assessment of a true storm surge barrier on the harbor, estimating the cost between $7 billion and $29 billion.

Even more city-relevant recommendations focus on solidifying the transportation network (which, it should be said, recovered rather well post-Sandy). The commission encourages measures to limit subway flooding, including waterproof roll-down doors at the foot of subway entrances, mechanical vent closures, and inflatable plugs or bladders for the tunnels themselves. It also suggests a general increase in pump capacity and upgrades of infrastructure subject to seawater erosion. More resilient airports — featuring raised runways, better drainage valves, and more emergency fuel storage — also get mentioned.

The biggest transportation suggestion is what the commission calls “redundancy.” Here the commission’s idea is to create so many overlapping routes into and out of the city that if one fails the others can continue to function. Recommendations include expanded intercity rail networks, more surface transit, additional ferry service, and continued support of non-motorized travel modes like biking.

There are a few particular projects endorsed by the commission to meet this redundancy goal. Some are the usual suspects: a new transit tunnel across the Hudson, expanded Long Island Railroad service, and Metro North commuter rail access at Penn Station on the west side (instead of only Grand Central on the east). The most novel idea is the establishment of a vast bus rapid transit network — beginning perhaps with a “BRT task force” created this year — to complement the rail system and fortify inter-borough corridors.

TheNew York Times, reporting last week on a draft of the report that seems similar to the final version, wondered if the recommendations weren’t too sprawling and vague. The Times also pointed out that a “disaster preparedness commission” already exists under state law, making the present one rather superfluous. Last, the paper notes that commissions and reports mean little if they aren’t followed by political action.

All these critiques of the NYS 2100 Commission are well taken. Still we shouldn’t forget that climate adaptation policy remains pretty uncharted territory. These problems are very new, the solutions largely untested. At some point quite soon New York (and other vulnerable cities) will have to select and implement adaptation measures. For now it’s at least a partial sign of urgency that we’re building consensus around the best ones.